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  • The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670-1789 by Albert N. Hamscher
  • David Parrott
The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670-1789. By Albert N. Hamscher. Newark: University of Delaware Press: Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. xviiiixviiii + 538538 pp., ill.

This detailed, chronologically wide-ranging study provides an unusual and valuable anatomizing of the neglected 'underside' of Ancien Régime French administration: how did the state from Colbert down to 1789 meet the costs of administering justice in the courts under royal authority, from the bailliages and sénéchaussées up to the provincial and Paris Parlements? Although officials' salaries were excluded from these frais de justice, almost all the basic judicial operating costs feature in the accounts, from officials' daily subsistence and travel allowances, to the costs of providing bread to prisoners in custody, or for taxed paper to copy trial records. Emphasizing the medieval origins of the Ancien Régime state, these costs were largely funded through income from the royal domain. Attempts were made to increase the domain's revenues, but there were other calls on this source, and the frais de justice, though relatively insignificant compared with military costs, were never adequately met. Moreover, as Albert Hamscher emphasizes, inability to meet the costs of justice had implications not just for the effectiveness of judicial procedure, but for the prosecution of criminal activity itself. The royal courts had cognizance of almost all serious crimes that threatened public order and security. The crown wished to see such grands criminels cases prosecuted, but limited budgets meant that law enforcement was patchy. Where private individuals were not prepared to initiate and pursue legal redress, responsibility fell to the state's prosecutors, and here the imperative to discipline and punish ran up against the frugality with which frais de justice were disbursed. Wishful thinking assumed that the difference between allocations from the royal domain and the real costs of administering the king's justice could be made good by fines levied on those prosecuted. This was recognized as illusory by those involved in the process, including the private plaintiffs, who were reluctant to commit their own resources to proceedings when hopes of compensation were limited. The main part of Hamscher's study takes this set of factors and shows how successive administrative regimes grappled with their implications. Colbert's predictably parsimonious attempt to restrict the disbursement of domain funds proved unworkable, and his successors prioritized the execution of justice above the attempt to constrain costs; they presided over what amounted to a gradual, albeit periodically interrupted, increase of financial commitment to the pursuit of grands [End Page 407] criminels cases, which by the end of the Ancien Régime were almost exclusively prosecuted by the crown. Hamscher's study is remarkable for the depth and detail of its research, with material collated from thirty-five departmental archives as well as Paris collections. Although the general outlines of legal expenditure are replicated across the courts of the généralités and provinces, and tell the same story of the crown's commitment and gradual increase of financial support, significant regional variations shaped the detailed patterns of expenditure. An Appendix provides comprehensive detail of this combination of general patterns and regional variations. This is an extraordinary piece of sustained research into the workings of a hitherto unexplored aspect of the Ancien Régime.

David Parrott
New College, Oxford
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